TULU Systems, LLC.: Enhancing Crisis Response Communications

Kurt Nguyen, President & CEO

As per the recent 2018 FBI report, active shooting incidents are escalating every year with 50 incidents in the past two years alone. This alarming fact entails emergency communication to be made an integral part of an organization’s emergency management strategy. Today, it is essential for an organization to update antiquated communication systems in place that only provides one-time alerts into a more robust two-way response system. Governed by the idea to create an effective emergency communication tool, Kurt Nguyen worked to develop the TULU Pro application, a simple and intuitive emergency notification and accountability app, hosted on a robust, secure, and reliable cloud environment. TULU Pro provides an effective solution that enables administrators of an organization to create ongoing alerts and helps first responders to reach and prioritize victims who have marked themselves as unsafe.

In cases of active shooter incidents or weather emergencies, communication is a critical asset in an emergency situation for first response teams. The TULU Pro app enables administrators to create alerts, provides situation updates on an ongoing basis, and offers users the feature to update their accountability as ‘okay’ or ‘not okay’ with a press of a button. The app, designed as ready-to-install enables the administrators to request safety response from all the users to track accountability of each individual. The user responses can be viewed by administrators on a dashboard to determine the unsafe and priority victims for first responders to geolocate their position and provide assistance on priority. Additionally, the administrators can add timestamps to their alerts to provide users the timeline of the incident. The users and the administrators can reach each other directly through calls, mail, and texts.

TULU Pro can easily be downloaded from Google Play and Apple app stores and provides a secure ecosystem for administrators to provide constant updates on strategies and safety plans during a crisis.

We focus on the communications layer and the ubiquitous way of leveraging technology such as mobility to get emergency information out to users as quickly and easily as possible

“From incidents such as Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech shooting, we understood that simplicity is the key in these situations to control and command communication,” notes Nguyen, president and CEO of Tulu Systems. Mindful of the stress and chaos that people undergo during a crisis, TULU Pro’s intuitive and simple emergency strategy helps both the administrators and the users alike.

To illustrate the advantages of the TULU Pro application, Nguyen shares a client interaction, where a university was in search of a solution that would empower their campus law and enforcement with a simple mechanism to send out alerts swiftly during a crisis. On implementing the TULU Pro app, the campus police can now not only send alerts to students, staff, and faculties within the premise but also to the university members outside the campus. The campus administrators can send alerts and updates in real-time as well as trigger the safety check feature for the alert receivers. Moreover, the app also provides the administrators with the flexibility to just send out alerts to students and faculties without the safety response mechanism being activated. For instance, alerts can be sent out during a road blockage or bad weather, which does not require any safety check from the receivers.

On a final note, Nguyen remarks, “We are not trying to address all aspects of emergency management nor are we trying to be a one-size fit for all solution. We focus on the communications layer and the ubiquitous way of leveraging technology such as mobility to get emergency information out to users quickly in a simple and easy manner.”